Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings by Sackville-West Vita

Author:Sackville-West, Vita [Sackville-West, Vita]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781250087386
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Perhaps Vita’s most celebrated book, about history, house, and herself, concerns her dearly loved and hard-lost Knole. Her relation to her colorful ancestors infuses the book with nostalgia and beauty. Yes, she hated growing old, but the age of this house marks it as venerable, and her relation to it as no less so. Vita’s passion for and knowledge of architecture was founded on her love of her house at Knole (its construction ranged from King John to King James), well documented in this history of that “great Elizabethan pile”1 and its—and her—ancestry.

There are further reflections on Knole and the adjacent property in her book English Country Houses. Knole House itself is illustrated in this small volume, and details of its construction and appearance abound. In her other descriptions, as in these, her writing feels lived, whether she is describing the black-and-white “startling and stripy” timber houses of thick beams placed in plaster of a pale coloring contrasting with the black beams, such as are found in Cheshire, or the brickwork of East Anglia, or then the buildings of Nicholas Hawksmoor. However, because of her personally intense connection to Knole, we are especially held by her description of it, the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury—the leader of the Anglican church—then a royal palace, later in its “fulfilment as the home of an English family in whose hands it has remained ever since 1586.” It feels organic, in spite of its five acres with its seven courtyards, gray and green, “quiet as a college; the garden paths suited to the pacings of scholars as well as of courtiers; its ‘stately and tempered medievalism lacks all taint of the nouveau riche.’” History speaks loudly from its Elizabethan and Jacobean interiors so richly decorated, with its long galleries and large fireplaces and big curtained bed (assigned to the King or the Venetian ambassador, or a poet or archbishop “or to Charles the Second spending a night there with Nell Gwyn”).2

But it is in Knole and the Sackvilles, with its intricate and nostalgic recounting of the intimate connection between her adored house and her ancestors, that Vita’s impassioned and intense reflection has the feeling of an entire heritage to which she is entitled both completely understood and irretrievably lost. Her childhood memories and her adult’s comprehension mingle here, as nowhere else. This is the nostalgic and melancholy Vita, who may have lost her heritage, but who has earned our respect by the detailed and careful delineation of her lineage and its place.

When, in 1957, Alvilde Lees-Milne visited Eddy Sackville-West, who was living in Ireland, Vita lamented: “Drip, drip, drip; and all so green, and Eddy mouldering away towards old age when Knole … coud be his—and he doesn’t want it, and I who would have given my soul for it.”3 Knole was taken over by the National Trust in 1947 and Vita wrote a new guidebook to the property at that time. Probably her last visit to the property was in 1958, when a letter to Harold expressed her continuing regret that the estate could not be hers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.